Zig-Zag Nam Style

Greetings,

Welcome to another edition of THIS IS YOUR LIFE brought to you by Vietnam Traffic Chaos Inc.

I'm a survivor of the mean streets having lived in Hanoi for five months last year. The density freaks out new visitors. Crossing a street is not for the faint of heart. If you try and cross a street your best strategy is to keep moving. This behavior will increase the probability of your survival. Until you have to cross another street.

If you hesitate or stop you die. Beep-beep.

Do I Zig or Zag? that is the question.

A live TV sit-com or high drama with comedic aspects about schools of beeping fish is clear and present.

From the A.P. Very accurate.

"...The new fines increase penalties up to seven times for various offenses, with the steepest hikes in Hanoi andHo Chi Minh City, the two largest cities. Car drivers caught running a red light — a common occurrence — will be fined up to 1.2 million Vietnamese dong ($63) in either city, while motorcyclists, who account for 95 percent of Vietnam's traffic, will owe up to 500,000 dong ($26).

Though fines are lower in rural provinces, they remain pricey for many in a country with an average monthlyincome of about $80. However, some have argued the new penalties will not deter the growing nouveau riche, who cruise the streets on expensive Vespa motorbikes or behind the wheels of BMWs and even Bentleys.

Zigzagging, a dangerous practice where drivers whip in and out of traffic to pass others, will carry a fine of up to 12 million dong ($630) for cars and 7 million dong ($370) for motorbikes. For that offense, along with going the wrong way on a one-way street, drivers will now also be stripped of their license for 30 days."

read more...

The cool thing is how much a poorly paid traffic cop armed with a whistle can make extorting bribes from stupid motor cycle maniacs. Maniacs! 

Metta.

 

 

Nomadic aliens

Greetings,

Sir Stephan Hawking, esteemed British theoretical scientist, has revealed the truth.
Aliens are here. Aliens are nomads intent on conquering planets in the solar system. 

Aliens may exist but mankind should avoid contact with them as the consequences could be devastating, Sir Hawking warned on Sunday.

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," the astrophysicist said in a new television series, according to British media reports.

"Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach," Hawking warned.

The doomsday scenario is suggested in the series Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking on the Discovery Channel, which began airing in the United States on Sunday.

On the probability of alien life existing, he says: "To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational.

"The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like."

"Glowing squid-like creatures, herds of herbivores that can hang onto a cliff face and bright yellow predators that kill their prey with stinging tails are among the creatures that stalk the scientist's fantastical cosmos.

"Mankind has already made a number of attempts to contact extraterrestrial civilizations."

Aliens understand energy, vibrations and frequencies.

Here is an all knowing, all benevolent, all seeing nomadic alien at a secret location on Earth. We are friends.

ITs mission is to conduct extensive long term experimental scientific research on stupid shallow homo sapiens and extract natural resources from the planet. 

Metta.

Ash China

Greetings,

Ash heard two jokes in Iceland.

After Iceland caused a financial meltdown in 2008 Europeans wanted cash not ash.
Icelandic people don't want their ashes spread all over Europe.

Europeans, rather than accept accountability, escape the responsibility by blaming someone, somewhere, somehow for this beautiful majestic natural mess.

According to Mr. Bisignani of the International Air Transport Association, "This is a European embarrassment and it's a European mess. The decision that Europe has made is with no risk assessment, no consultation, no co-ordination, no leadership," he said.

"Europeans are still using a system based on a theoretical model which does not work... instead of using a system and taking decisions on facts and on risk assessment."

Ash currently holds 6.8 million travelers hostage around the world. It is the largest hostage situation in the history of mankind since Red China held 1.6 billion citizens hostage in the spring of 2010. 

Ash flew to China to verify this unpleasant fact. Ash rested inside 1.6 billion pairs of ears.

Easy to say and hard to do they say in China.
Speaking of China in Mandarin, you can get your ears cleaned there.
What! Really?

Yes. Now it happened at the empty Chinese opera one afternoon in Chengdu, you sit down in a wicker chair and give the girl in a blue uniform 10Y or slightly more than a buck. A group of Chinese men in wicker chairs drinking tea stare and laugh at you. Everyone stares at you in China because it is a zoo and you are an exotic humanoid species of endless speculation.

Look at the funny foreigner! He’s going to get his ears cleaned. Boy is he in for a surprise!

You sit back and close your eyes. She has all the tools; long steel wires, cotton swabs, some ointment, a microscopic spoon on a post and a pair of stainless steel tongs.

She probes into your right ear with the spoon and digs out hard brown wax. She flicks it on the ground where it becomes part of Ear Wax Mountain, a new wonder of the World. She swabs and cleans out your ear with a small cotton ball on a thin wire.

While this is buried in your ear she taps the tongs creating a vibrating frequency. She touches the steel rod in your ear and you hear the WHIRLING BUZZ BUZZ as 1,000 bees and cicadas invade your consciousness with a deafening crescendo.

She has opened your aural chambers big time taps the tongs again, and you receive the echo chamber canyon of sound, the WHIRLING BUZZ like sandpaper being rasped against old fibers of skin or yes, the fast centrifugal centrifuge of heartbeat reactors, roaring rivers inside a galaxy of weightless streams. BUZZ!

So she eases it out, massages your temples and your eyes are closed and you are dreaming you are in a Chinese opera playing the role of an old dramatic hero dying at his post after proclaiming his undying love for family and harmonious social order and stability in the country.

She attacks and cleans the other ear and the vibrations take you away.

BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ! Far away. She caresses your ears with something soft, massages your temples and scalp and when she finishes you no longer have a hearing problem. It’s all in the listening. You’ve been buzzed back to clarity.

Everything that goes in the ear comes out as language. It becomes a tool for emotion and expression.

Metta.

Mine

Greetings,

Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. 

Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture?

I don't know how to read so I like to look at pictures. 

My country has 11.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million mines. Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don't have working medical facilities.

Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground. I'm really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places.

I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn't like it ;-(

They call this denial. He said it gave him nightmares. So it goes.

My village is my world. Where do you live?

Metta.

Cambodian Land Mine Museum...

Landmines in Cambodia...

Split the difference

Greetings,

Do you want the short version or the long version? This a perfectly appropriate question in life's chess game of experiences and conversations, especially while traversing the road less traveled on Earth, a spinning rock.

If you flesh out the short version with some immediate specific personal details it becomes longer, growing as threads of character development and destiny as character is destiny inter-twine a kind a rope made of hemp fibers or tightly woven reeds from a river in Mesopotamia which you can employ to hang yourself or pull yourself to safety or easily used by someone in the story before, during or after you finish what erupted as a simple sentence with a line long enough to hang laundry on taking on a life of it's own because you are a conduit, a towering magical volcanic mountain releasing hot molten lava from a highly charged pressurized center. 

A burning ring of fire.

Give someone a match and they'll be warm for a minute. Set them on fire and they'll be warm for the rest of their life.

This molten conglomeration of dust, mud, water, soil, sediment, sandstone, gas, graphite, gypsum, rocks, boulders, pebbles, 24-carat carbon diamonds, fossilized fragments of vegetarian dinosaurs, compressed plankton and every imaginable geological logical particle known to man, woman and child and even others blasts it's way out of the deep red hot core of existence into the atmosphere where it cools, then gravity, the scourge of civilization and it's malcontents, contributes it's force as the dense weight of mass falls, slithers, slides, rumbles, cascades, rolls, strolls, runs, flowing down, down, down engulfing everything in it's path melting the landscape, carving new strata grand canyons gouging out a path for the quickly cooling massive debris reaching it's crescendo before slowing to a mere glowing vein.

Metta.

2-million year old bones in Spain.

Carmen, a famous chef in Eugene, Oregon.